10. New York, New York

May 2017 – Ch. 9 to focus on the Shapiro presidency and the belated but full throated identification of Barnard with its hometown.
[Currently at 4600 words]

  1. New York, New York:
    Barnard During the Shapiro Presidency

 

“I wouldn’t trade Barnard’s location for Wellesley’s endowment.”
— President Judith R. Shapiro, often

  1. Shapiro bio
    2. Embracing the City
    3. Domesticating Columbia
    4. A Professor’s President
    5. Students at the Millennial Turn

 

The announcement  in April 1993 of Ellen Futter’s planned resignation after 13  years as president of Barnard to accept the presidency of the American Museum of Natural History that July surprised most members of her Cabinet. The  trustees promptly  appointed Kathryn Rodgers, then Vice President for Student Affairs,  and  before that College Counsel, a graduate of Smith College and Columbia Law School, as acting president.  A search began for Futter’s successor.

 

Auspicious times. Barnard’s 10th leader and 6th president  would  to be the first in Barnard’s 105-year history to commence her tenure with virtually all the College’s  vital signs  trending upward. Not since Rosemary Park in 1962, would an incoming leader of Barnard arrive on campus to more upbeat institutional circumstances.

Futter did much more to turn Barnard’s fortunes around during her thirteen –year presidency than  present purposes allow mentioning, leaving the college in better shape than it had ever been in except perhaps at the Mcintosh-Park transfer in 1962. But unlike  then, that from Ellen to her successor put the college in the hands of a new president, Judith R. Shapiro, even more suited to represent – to personify — Barnard’s urban identity than her predecessor or any of Barnard’s eight earlier administrative heads.

Judith Shapiro was born in Queens– an upwardly mobile ethnically mixed (but all-white) neighborhood — “But not Jamaica Estates”  – Donald Trump’s tonier neighborhood. Grew up in Queens – an upwardly mobile ethnically mixed (but all-white) neighborhood of  Jamaica Estates/North   (“But not Jamaica Estates”  – Donald Trump’s tonier neighborhood.   Judith’s father was an accountant (not a CPA) who kept the books for the Belmont Race Track. Her mother was a librarian, who, unlike her husband, was a college graduate She attended PS 26 (with Jy Gould and Jonathan Cole)  and Jamaica High School.

Her parents were Jews whose parents came from Belorussia – not very observant Reform Jews
“I do feel like a New York Jew”
College-shopping.  Turned off by Smith visit – pleated skirt/circle pin/sweater set — “Holy moly, get me out of here.” She did not apply to Barnard  because she would have had to have commuted.
Went to Brandeis on a scholarship as a theatre major – “I wanted to be an actress” à into history after a semester
Brandeis’s “golden age” – historians there Keller/Marcuse….
Two social circles – upwardly mobile professional-school bound and the hipsters – JRS among the latter
Folk singer summers in Cambridge/Provincetown – junior year in France
Graduated in  1963 – Accepted at Harvard and Berkeley in history à Berkeley
1963-64 — French history/Carl Schorske – “Not right… spending my life in an archive”
1964-65 – Back to NYC in summer ‘64
Fall 1965 – to CU in cultural anthropology/NIH fellowship
1965-67 – Study for orals in spring 1967
Fall 1967 à Brazil as a Charles Wagley protégé  (“Wagley’s niece”)
PhD awarded in 1969 —
Sex Roles and Social Structure Among the Yanomami Indians of Northern Brazil (1972)

1970 — Appointed Ast. Prof. U. Chicago – first woman in Department of Anthropology;
there for 5 years, but 1974-75 on a post-doc at Berkeley
Passed up a second-term appointment as ast. prof. at UC to go to Bryn Mawr (as tenured associate professor?)
1975 – Harris Wofford president; Pat McPherson “provost” à president in 1978
McPherson – “an incarnational president” – ego strength without meanness
1975-87 – Bryn Mawr anthropologist – 5-member department à chair
1985-86 Made acting Dean of Undergraduate College by President Pat McPherson on Mary Dunn’s departure to become president of Smith
Fall 1986  — Chief academic officer of College – office created with her appointment
Big challenge – close BM’s tiny graduate programs – develop programs with Haverford/Swarthmore
1986 – 1993 – Chief academic officer – mentioned for jobs at Amherst and Williams

Barnard opening – JRS knew from Seven Sister conferences (Bob McCaughey) and CU-trained  anthropologists at Barnard (Klass/Rosman/Rubel/Vincent)
Smitten with search committee – Helene Kaplan/Pat Green/Anna Quindlen
Faculty members??  Dick Pious??

 

JRS’s credentials:
Age 54 — Experience with a top women’s college; a native New Yorker; knew Columbia; an academic when faculty pushing for  an academic – McPherson promoting; JRS wanted the job

Inauguration October 27, 1994
Innovation: a member of support staff among the official welcomers

New dean/provost (Elizabeth Boylan) appointed six months into new presidency;  took over 7/95

Why the Shapiro presidency successful rather than “just lucky timing”?
Made the most of the overall “good times” to advance Barnard’s wellbeing above and beyond the lift that could be attributed to the good times

 

BC/CU Relations Required  Careful Attending
New CU president George Rupp not particularly focused on Barnard, though his interest
in CC suggestive of a commitment to improving the Columbia undergraduate experience.
GR upon arrival in ‘94: “BC a problem that needed solving.”
Upon his installation could not be counted on to be sympathetic to Barnard’s existence.

Incoming Rupp took some selling to see Barnard as other than  “anomalous” – an attack fish with a dorsal fin – but “unique”
JRS persuades Rupp  with evidence of BC quality and complementarity
Helped by good relations with Provost Jonathan Cole – PS 26 ties that bind…
Strikes up in 1996 fruitful alliance and friendship with newly installed SEAS dean Zvi Galil
Admirer of CC Dean Austin Quigley – he earlier helpful in staffing the Barnard Theater Department ; his wife a member of the Barnard English Department
Plant
Major projects
1. Cathedral Gardens – housing for students and faculty; had been a Columbia undertaking but decided against after Manhattanville commitments; sit offered BC by NYC for quick decision; administration/board took on the project despite having to borrow nearly all the money to do it and with no pre-planning to do so

2. Diana Center – Multiplex – Much more  architecturally exciting use of same footprint as McIntosh – far more directly accepting/flaunting its fronting “On Broadway.” First of Barnard’s buildings to do so.
Represented an architectural statement as to the College’s self-identity as of the City, not merely in it.

Other plant improvements:
Upgrade of science labs in Altschul and Milbank
Better public spaces – Kreuger  and Held lecture halls; Altschul auditorium

Two related changes in financial aid policies:

1. Did away with the century-long policy that limited residential financial support to applicants from outside New York City à Commuter-Residence Policy
Now possible for NYC applicants to secure financial support for on-campus housing – made coming to Barnard more attractive to top City applicants who had earlier been dissuaded from coming to Barnard by the College’s assumption they would live at home.

 

  1. Altered the way students studying abroad were expected to pay for doing so:

Old policy had students paying the sponsoring college for their program (amount dependably less than BC’s tuition) but with no financial assistance provided those on financial aid.
New policy required BC students to pay BC tuition while abroad but provided assistance to those on financial aid. Both increased BC revenues from students studying abroad and made semester-abroad option more ava Policy both deprived BC of income from semester-abroad-students and made it less likely that students on financial liable to financial aid students.

 

 

Administration
Other senior administrative appointments, some to individuals already at Barnard [Schmitter/Denburg], others brought to the College during her administration, increased the efficiency of operations overall  while maintaining some of the small-college camaraderie that is often a casualty of  efficiency. {financial aid; the bursar; groundskeeping…]
Students
Admissions becoming more selective every year of JRS presidency
1995 — 2700 applicants  43% admit
2008 – 4300 applicants — <30% admits
Most selective of the remaining Sisters
Ethnic/racial mix
Beginning of attention being paid to first-generations as a recruitment target
More Pell Grants
More boarding school graduates

Well liked by alumnae/the liking reciprocated – receptive to her singing the Broadway standards of a particular class’s era….
Two Major Challenges – one at outset; one at close

  1. 1996 –first and most unsettling challenge — Secretarial strike Feb-Sept. 1996 – protracted, disruptive and accompanied by some faculty pressure on administration to settle….
  2. 2007-08 Late in JRS tenure — Controversy over tenure consideration of the anthropologist Nadia Abu-El Haj — Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2005) [controversy reported on in New Yorker, April 14, 2008]
    JRS unwilling to accede to pressure from some alums and some faculty elsewhere and at Barnard to block Adu El-Haj’s tenure consideration.

    Other Skirmishes:

    1997-98 — Student pressure to rehabilitate sororities at Barnard

2001 –Dealing with distress in wake of World Trade Center terrorist attack

One  perceived problem – US News and World Report ratings of Barnard
Problem: Hurt by our sharing instructional resources with Columbia in ways that led USNWR to not credit them to Barnard – the result being a ranking in the mid-20s of liberal arts colleges
Yet felt need to explain to trustees – Upon Provost laboring to do so at a board meeting , one trustee responded: “Feel better now?”
ESB “venting” on subject as acting president?

 

2005 — Return of ROTC to Columbia – JRS quietly supportive of its return her younger sister a psychiatrist in US Army; majority of faculty strongly against

Impressive effort  to acknowledge/put right  two wrongs in Barnard’s past:

Discriminatory practices used between the world wars to limit the number of Jewish students coming to Barnard  – and limit NYC public high schoolers more generally. Such practices eliminated in late 1940s long before JRS presidency but seldom thereafter acknowledged.
JRS publicly/personally  comfortable with herself as a “New York Jew” – more so than either her predecessor or successor, both  Jewish but from the suburbs — Port Washington and Chappaqua respectively — not Queens.  Neither inclined to break into song at the slightest chance it might be welcomed….

At urging of  Deanof the College Dorothy Denburg  and Associate Dean of Faculty Flora Davidson, JRS lifted the prohibition against the use of scholarship funds to provided campus housing for financially eligible NYC residents

2. Willingness to acknowledge Barnard’s long poor record in welcoming/attracting/recruiting. black students
Commencement acknowledgment of racially discriminatory policies in Barnard medalist ceremony  in 19xx. – Jeanne Blackwell Hutson (BC 1935). Upon her arrival as transfer from University of Michigan, was denied the on-campus residency that her acceptance had pledged because of her race. Lived in International House until graduating in 1935
 

Gracious exit

JRS signed on for ten, stayed for 14. Here to welcome her successor so no need for an interim/acting president. Briefly tried retirement, some consulting and a return to teaching become a participant and promoter of Mark Carnes’s nationally acclaimed “Reacting to the Past” teaching platform. In 2013 she became president of the Teagle Foundation, having earlier served on its  board. Continues to live both on Morningside Heights  and in suburban Philadelphia (name of town?]. Maintains a lively interest in the College, along with a healthy appreciation of the prime  rule of administrative  succession: “One-president-at-a-time.”

Summary assessment
The administrative challenge in good times: Help the College take fullest advantage/make the most  of the favorable circumstances; Make one’s presidency more than  a local  institutional affirmation of Robert Merton’s (by way of the New Testament evangelist) “Matthew Effect”: “To everyone who has been given will be given more”

Set straight some crooked aspects of the past
JRS: “Barnard’s location or Wellesley’s endowment??
Location, everytime….

 

Thanks.

——————————————————————————————————————————

 

 

 

Students –
Enrollments by the mid-1990s had stabilized at manageable levels with all incoming students now assured on-campus residence.
The virtual disappearance of a substantial commuting cohort with the opening of Centennial improved student morale.

Admissions  had recovered from the troubles of the early and mid-1980s, when the admit rate hovered around 50%, the product  of local uncertainties about Barnard’s future and a national dip in college-age population. Long-term trend toward a more national student body continuing, making College less dependent on the no-growth northeast region.

Financial aid funding remained significant (discount rate?) in light of the need to cover most of it with current income. The College’s commitment to “need blind” policy remained firm.

Early tensions generated between Columbia’s first cohorts of women undergraduates and Barnard students persist but reduced by cross-Broadway collaborations.
Racial tensions of the 1970s also lessened with Barnard’s minority student population now including, in addition to African Americans, Latinas and Asian Americans in numbers.

Finances
Substantial long-term debt assumed with construction of Sulzberger, but serviceable;
Naming gifts covered only xx% of building’s cost – and none of the financing costs incurred by
borrowing the rest.
String of balanced budgets back to the mid 1980s suggested College operating within its means
Endowment still relatively small ($40 million) but growing (had doubled under EVF)
Fundraising procedures professionalized in late 1980s for the successful Centennial Campaign
2nd phase of EVF campaign – raised $65 million

Budgetary problem at the outset of the Shapiro administration:  Development/campaign costs not part of the operating budget – not really accounted for or offset by income – decision to include them in budget added $1.5 million to expenses for two years.

Faculty
Transition from the “teacher-scholar” earlier model to that of  “scholar-teacher” pretty completely effected; tenure disagreements , now resolved mostly on Barnard side of Broadway; decline in proportion of Ad Hoc rejections.
Measured use of strategic senior hires in EVF years had lifted the Faculty’s scholarly profile
Increase in # of  endowed chairs, more generous leave policy and merit salary policies win broad acceptance among faculty – and limit criticism of still relatively heavy five-course teaching programs .

Barnard hiring more minority faculty but experiencing challenges retaining them against competitive offers from elsewhere.

Trustees
Decade of Helene Kaplan’s chairmanship (1983-93) had reestablished effective/trusting  relations between trustees and administrative leadership.
Board appears to be without its besetting internal divisions of the 1970s

BC/CU Relations
EVF relations with Columbia officials for the most part cordial; Rodgers worked well with CU counterparts
Sustained during the Rodgers acting presidency (July 1993-June 1994)
Financial relationship stable; earlier X-registration ups and downs smoothed
The State of NYC
JRS presidency coincided with mayoralities of Rudolph Guiliani (1994-2001) and  Michael Bloomberg (2001-2013), by which time the City had recovered from its near financial collapse in the mid-1970s, had reversed the population slide thanks in part to  renewed immigration, and had reinforced its claims as the cultural and financial center of the nation. It had also become increasingly attractive as a safe and exciting place to attend college. So, too, with prospective faculty, earlier dissuaded from coming because of the living costs and, for faculty with children the uncertainties of the public schools, now wanted in on the cosmopolitan action.
Location, location, location….
Succession Process
EVF departed after 13 years by her choice – to assume an equally prestigious/demanding position
Interim presidency of Kathryn Rodgers successful and without disruptive incidents – would leave shortly Acting presidency of Kathryn J. Rodgers
Smith 1970 – CU JD 1973
Labor lawyer in NYC  1973-1980
Hired by CU Law classmate EVF in 1981;

Rodgers has been at Barnard since 1981 and has taken on an ever-  widening variety of administrative responsibilities since then. As general counsel, she has been responsible for all of the College’s   legal affairs and for community and government relations.
Absence of academic credentials likely the eliminating factor for presidency
Left for  NOW after new president’s arrival (as would CFO Sigmund G. Ginsburg, who went to AMNH);
Dean of Faculty Robert A. McCaughey, who had served during EVF’s last seven years,  returned to faculty prior to new president’s arrival.
Selection of Judith Shapiro
Process facilitated by absence of an announced internal candidate, although the acting president  had some internal support.
General agreement that a woman with direct academic-administrative experience was desirable
Better yet, someone with experience with women’s colleges
Someone with scholarly standing
Someone familiar with/comfortable in New York
Someone not a stranger to Columbia

State of academic labor market in 1990s such that earlier shortages – as in 1975 at the time of the Mattfeld appointment — no longer obtained
The “Pat McPherson Presidential Placement” – Bryn Mawr Mafia à job-placement juggernaut operation delivered:
McPherson intimately familiar with Barnard’s condition, having chaired the Middle States Accreditation Team in 1991.

1970 — Appointed Ast. Prof. U. Chicago – first woman in Department of Anthropology;
there for 5 years, but 1974-75 on a post-doc at Berkeley
Passed up a second-term appointment as ast. prof. at UC to go to Bryn Mawr (as tenured associate professor?)
1975 – Harris Wofford president; Pat McPherson “provost” à president in 1978
McPherson – “an incarnational president” – ego strength without meanness
1975-87 – Bryn Mawr anthropologist – 5-member department à chair
1985-86 Made acting Dean of Undergraduate College by President Pat McPherson on Mary Dunn’s departure to become president of Smith
Fall 1986  — Chief academic officer of College – office created with her appointment
Big challenge – close BM’s tiny graduate programs – develop programs with Haverford/Swarthmore
1986 – 1993 – Chief academic officer – mentioned for jobs at Amherst and Williams

Barnard opening – JRS knew from Seven Sister conferences (Bob McCaughey) and CU-trained  anthropologists at Barnard (Klass/Rosman/Rubel/Vincent)
Smitten with search committee – Helene Kaplan/Pat Green/Anna Quindlen
Faculty members??  Dick Pious??

 

JRS’s credentials:
Age 54 — Experience with a top women’s college; a native New Yorker; knew Columbia; an academic when faculty pushing for  an academic – McPherson promoting; JRS wanted the job

Inauguration October 27, 1994
Innovation: a member of support staff among the official welcomers

New dean/provost (Elizabeth Boylan) appointed six months into new presidency;  took over 7/95

Why the Shapiro presidency successful rather than “just lucky timing”?
Made the most of the overall “good times” to advance Barnard’s wellbeing above and beyond the lift that could be attributed to the good times

 

BC/CU Relations Required  Careful Attending
New CU president George Rupp not particularly focused on Barnard, though his interest
in CC suggestive of a commitment to improving the Columbia undergraduate experience.
GR upon arrival in ‘94: “BC a problem that needed solving.”
Upon his installation could not be counted on to be sympathetic to Barnard’s existence.

Incoming Rupp took some selling to see Barnard as other than  “anomalous” – an attack fish with a dorsal fin – but “unique”
JRS persuades Rupp  with evidence of BC quality and complementarity
Helped by good relations with Provost Jonathan Cole – PS 26 ties that bind…
Strikes up in 1996 fruitful alliance and friendship with newly installed SEAS dean Zvi Galil
Admirer of CC Dean Austin Quigley – he earlier helpful in staffing the Barnard Theater Department ; his wife a member of the Barnard English Department
Faculty
Quickly embraced as one of them/us – made herself available/accessible to faculty
–active  member of Anthropology department
Spoke to the faculty in meetings in their language —
Taught a course?  Member of any University Seminars??
Got fully engaged in curricular updating à “Nine Ways of Knowing”
Added attention to women and  gender; urban studies; neuroscience; architecture; globalization of the social sciences –

Youngish tenured  Barnard faculty, especially minority faculty, subject to raiding:
Lost in single year:
Caryl Phillips to Yale
Benjamin Buchloh to Harvard
Gretchen Gerzina to Dartmouth

Alison Wylie was the fourth of the tenured faculty who were hired away in a single year – it must have been 2005.  To the Univ of Washington in Philosophy.

 

Introduced substantial  start-up packages as recruitment device;  increased $$ for research-related purchases

The case of history department – early 1990s — a dozen appointments clustered around the study of US and Western Europe
2008 – 15 appointments with LA/Africa/ East and South Asia all among their regional interests.
Americanists include specialist in African-American history

Faculty Development – broadening global coverage  — reduce dependency upon Columbia for courses outside US and Europe

Broadened  racial and ethnic composition

Ford Foundation grant for “Difficult Dialogues” program run by Women’s Studies (Janet Jacobsen) and Africana Studies (Kim Hall) – used to canvass field for potential minority hires
Initial plan – a senior and a junior appointment
Final decision – make three senior offers:
Tina Campt
Celia Naylor
Yvette Christianese

 

Continued to promote/facilitate/recognize  scholarly activity among faculty
Secured a new generation of homegrown tenured science faculty  through promotion
Several key outside senior appointments:
Walter Neumann, mathematics
Janet Jakobsen, Women’s Studies
David Weiman, economics
Anne Higonnet, Art History
Dorothy Ko, History
Frederick Neuhouser, Philosophy
Jose Moya, History
Kim Hall, English and Africana Studies
Dusa McDuff, mathematics

 

Gender distribution remains around 60% women/40% men during JRS presidency
[Check with Laura Kay on this; ESB thinks #s were suggestive of ongoing and worsening  disparity in tenure rates for women]
Science faculty increased from 19% to 25% of the f/time faculty
Declining incidence of women faculty with women’s college undergraduate experience
Declining incidence of CU PhDs among faculty appointees (35% to 15%)

Prepared to fight to retain faculty being recruited from elsewhere; experienced  some leakage, especially in holding minority faculty, but able to find improve the overall scholarly level of the faculty while making no compromises on the requirements of effective teaching, as measured in part by a more robust student evaluation process and penetrating third-year reviews.

Salaries for faculty  still lagged behind those of Columbia, but abandoning the traditional lock-step policy of across-the-board salary adjustments in favor of a more merit-based compensation policy (introduced in later EVF years) allowed for the monetary recognition of individual achievements. Similarly, the introduction of Senior Faculty Research Leaves  in 1990 ( the prospect of a semester’s leave with pay in between sabbaticals), followed by Special Assistant Professor Leaves/SAPLS (in their 4th years) provided faculty more time to advance their scholarly agendas. The occasional senior appointment to supplement what continued to be a mostly home-grown  faculty strengthened it both in providing leadership and allowing the College to move quickly into new areas of teaching and research. JS as a professor’s president….

JRS made excellent and complementary choice in her dean of faculty/provost – biologist Elizabeth Boylan à forceful/decisive but transparent and caring; stayed on throughout JRS presidency and well into that of DS (6/2011) before becoming a senior official at the Sloan Foundation.

Finances
Endowment quadrupled from $40 million to $200 million
Last 10 of her 14 years enjoyed a rising stock market
Budgets regularly ran modest “surpluses”
Secured named gift from trustee Diana Vagelos and her husband of $xx, xxx,xxx for new student center
Annual scholarship dinners become significant source of giving to the College

Plant
Major projects
1. Cathedral Gardens – housing for students and faculty; had been a Columbia undertaking but decided against after Manhattanville commitments; sit offered BC by NYC for quick decision; administration/board took on the project despite having to borrow nearly all the money to do it and with no pre-planning to do so

2. Diana Center – Multiplex – Much more  architecturally exciting use of same footprint as McIntosh – far more directly accepting/flaunting its fronting “On Broadway.” First of Barnard’s buildings to do so.
Represented an architectural statement as to the College’s self-identity as of the City, not merely in it.

Other plant improvements:
Upgrade of science labs in Altschul and Milbank
Better public spaces – Kreuger  and Held lecture halls; Altschul auditorium

Two related changes in financial aid policies:

1. Did away with the century-long policy that limited residential financial support to applicants from outside New York City à Commuter-Residence Policy
Now possible for NYC applicants to secure financial support for on-campus housing – made coming to Barnard more attractive to top City applicants who had earlier been dissuaded from coming to Barnard by the College’s assumption they would live at home.

 

  1. Altered the way students studying abroad were expected to pay for doing so:

Old policy had students paying the sponsoring college for their program (amount dependably less than BC’s tuition) but with no financial assistance provided those on financial aid.
New policy required BC students to pay BC tuition while abroad but provided assistance to those on financial aid. Both increased BC revenues from students studying abroad and made semester-abroad option more ava Policy both deprived BC of income from semester-abroad-students and made it less likely that students on financial liable to financial aid students.

 

 

Administration
Other senior administrative appointments, some to individuals already at Barnard [Schmitter/Denburg], others brought to the College during her administration, increased the efficiency of operations overall  while maintaining some of the small-college camaraderie that is often a casualty of  efficiency. {financial aid; the bursar; groundskeeping…]
Students
Admissions becoming more selective every year of JRS presidency
1995 — 2700 applicants  43% admit
2008 – 4300 applicants — <30% admits
Most selective of the remaining Sisters
Ethnic/racial mix
Beginning of attention being paid to first-generations as a recruitment target
More Pell Grants
More boarding school graduates

Well liked by alumnae/the liking reciprocated – receptive to her singing the Broadway standards of a particular class’s era….
Two Major Challenges – one at outset; one at close

1. 1996 –first and most unsettling challenge — Secretarial strike Feb-Sept. 1996 – protracted, disruptive and accompanied by some faculty pressure on administration to settle….

  1. 2007-08 Late in JRS tenure — Controversy over tenure consideration of the anthropologist Nadia Abu-El Haj — Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2005) [controversy reported on in New Yorker, April 14, 2008]
    JRS unwilling to accede to pressure from some alums and some faculty elsewhere and at Barnard to block Adu El-Haj’s tenure consideration.

    Other Skirmishes:

    1997-98 — Student pressure to rehabilitate sororities at Barnard

2001 –Dealing with distress in wake of World Trade Center terrorist attack

One  perceived problem – US News and World Report ratings of Barnard
Problem: Hurt by our sharing instructional resources with Columbia in ways that led USNWR to not credit them to Barnard – the result being a ranking in the mid-20s of liberal arts colleges
Yet felt need to explain to trustees – Upon Provost laboring to do so at a board meeting , one trustee responded: “Feel better now?”
ESB “venting” on subject as acting president?

 

2005 — Return of ROTC to Columbia – JRS quietly supportive of its return her younger sister a psychiatrist in US Army; majority of faculty strongly against

Impressive effort  to acknowledge/put right  two wrongs in Barnard’s past:

Discriminatory practices used between the world wars to limit the number of Jewish students coming to Barnard  – and limit NYC public high schoolers more generally. Such practices eliminated in late 1940s long before JRS presidency but seldom thereafter acknowledged.
JRS publicly/personally  comfortable with herself as a “New York Jew” – more so than either her predecessor or successor, both  Jewish but from the suburbs — Port Washington and Chappaqua respectively — not Queens.  Neither inclined to break into song at the slightest chance it might be welcomed….

At urging of  Deanof the College Dorothy Denburg  and Associate Dean of Faculty Flora Davidson, JRS lifted the prohibition against the use of scholarship funds to provided campus housing for financially eligible NYC residents

2. Willingness to acknowledge Barnard’s long poor record in welcoming/attracting/recruiting. black students
Commencement acknowledgment of racially discriminatory policies in Barnard medalist ceremony  in 19xx. – Jeanne Blackwell Hutson (BC 1935). Upon her arrival as transfer from University of Michigan, was denied the on-campus residency that her acceptance had pledged because of her race. Lived in International House until graduating in 1935
 

Gracious exit

JRS signed on for ten, stayed for 14. Here to welcome her successor so no need for an interim/acting president. Briefly tried retirement, some consulting and a return to teaching become a participant and promoter of Mark Carnes’s nationally acclaimed “Reacting to the Past” teaching platform. In 2013 she became president of the Teagle Foundation, having earlier served on its  board. Continues to live both on Morningside Heights  and in suburban Philadelphia (name of town?]. Maintains a lively interest in the College, along with a healthy appreciation of the prime  rule of administrative  succession: “One-president-at-a-time.”

Summary assessment
The administrative challenge in good times: Help the College take fullest advantage/make the most  of the favorable circumstances;
Make one’s presidency more than  a local  institutional affirmation of Robert Merton’s (by way of the New Testament evangelist) “Matthew Effect”: “To everyone who has been given will be given more”

 

Last updated: October 29, 2016
Bob McCaughey
[email protected]